Dell’s mini Container Data Center fits in a suitcase

October 14, 2009 Dave Ohara

GigaOm has a video interview of Dell’s Jimmy Pike, Director of system architecture in Dell’s Data Center Solutions.

Pike has crammed two servers running dual-core, 2.5 GHz Intel processors (Harpertown), 32 GB of memory, 4 TB of disk space for storage, a power supply, a 5-port Gigabit Ethernet Switch and even some solid-state drives into a metal box. The box consumes about 325 watts, is relatively portable and provides enough performance to act as a DNS server or a data center for a small business (although since it’s relatively portable, data theft becomes a distinct possibility.) Pike uses it to test ideas and software for clients of Dell’s Data Center Solutions’ Group, which sells custom-built servers to hyperscale computing clients such as Facebook.

Apple Co-Founder, Steve Wozniak is hot for solid state storage, MySpace Case Study

October 14, 2009 Dave Ohara

ComputerWorld has an article about Steve Wozniak, Apple co-founder, and he is excited about the energy savings in the data center.

Also, I've been close to a lot of people who worked in data centers - good friends -- and it's just like data centers always have huge racks and racks of equipment. And, almost every entity in the world is basing its operations on servers and disk storage, so it's almost unlimited. So [with Fusion-io] you're not confined to one little niche.

Now you may think what does Woz know about storage? Being ex-Apple I knew this part.

You've never really been a storage guy. What attracted you to this technology? Well, I was a storage guy really early - in floppy disks. I don't come from the heavy-duty storage area where you've got RAID arrays and fiber optic channels. But, actually, the way I approached even designing my floppy disk structures was to take out a lot of middle man technology that wasn't needed - to look at the overall problem and get from the start to the finish in one quick jump. And, I saw those same principles had been applied in designing [Fusion-io's] product.

The solution is not a SSD, but a PCIe card.

Computerworld - Earlier this year, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniakaccepted the position of chief scientist at start-up solid state drive company Fusion-io. It's the first time since 1972, when he worked in Hewlett-Packard Co's calculator division, that he's held a technologist's position for a company that wasn't his own.

Unlike many other solid state vendors, Fusion-io doesn't manufacture a NAND flash drive product in a 2.5-in. or 3.5-in hard drive form factor. The company makes PCIe cards with up to 640GB of capacity and 1.6GB/sec. throughput that can be inserted directly into servers, greatly increasing performance for I/O-intensive applications while also shrinking space requirements when compared to high-end hard disk drives.

Fusion-iO has a press release regarding their deployment at MySpace data center.

MySpace Uses Fusion-Powered I/O to Drive Greener Datacenters
Technology from Fusion-io Enables MySpace to Significantly Reduce Carbon Footprint, Saving Power, Cooling and Maintenance Costs
SALT LAKE CITY and LOS ANGELES – October 13, 2009 – Fusion-io today announced that it is working closely with MySpace to dramatically reduce the carbon footprint and costs associated with MySpace's datacenter operations. Using innovative solid-state storage solutions from Fusion-io, MySpace successfully deployed Fusion-io's technology to optimize their capital equipment and reduce the floor space and power consumed by their datacenter operations – significantly minimizing MySpace's environmental impact.
The revolutionary new deployment by MySpace offers another example of how solid-state storage technologies from Fusion-io give today's brightest engineering teams the power to rethink their datacenters and achieve dramatically lowered capital and operational costs by optimizing existing infrastructure for increased ease of management while greening the datacenter.

The case study PDF has more details.

The Results
Implementing Fusion-io gave MySpace the following benefits:
• Provided much higher performance, improving the user experience
• Cut hardware needs by 60%
• Significantly reduced its carbon footprint by lowering power and cooling requirements
• Recovered 280U of rack space
• Improved its data center’s reliability with non-volatile, 11-bit error correcting memory, and elimination of 2300 failure points
• Paid a much lower upfront price than for competitive solutions
Shawn plans to replace all of the remaining 1770 2U servers with Fusion-io enabled servers as they reach their end-of-life. This will allow MySpace to recover at least 1770U of rack space in the future, eliminate at least 18,000 failure points in their system, and save millions of dollars in power and cooling costs, showing
the world that you can make the smart business buy a green one too.

NYtimes - Atom and ARM server companies

October 13, 2009 Dave Ohara

NYTtimes has a blog post on lower power mobile chips being used in Servers.

October 6, 2009, 5:00 PM

Servers With Cellphone Chips? Yep, Here They Come
By ASHLEE VANCE
If a server runs on a smartphone chip is it still a server?

The era of such a deeply philosophical data center question is upon us. A pair of stealthy start-ups have placed smartphone chips at the center of their plans to create a new breed of low-power servers. They’re hoping that this radical take on data center hardware will attract the likes of Google, Facebook and Microsoft, which all battle energy costs on a huge scale.

The Intel Atom based company is SeaMicro.

SeaMicro, based in Santa Clara, Calif., has put together a server based onIntel’s Atom chip, which currently slots into things like netbooks and other mobile computing devices. Intel expects Atom to drive its cell phone strategy in the coming years as well.

Exact details on the SeaMicro product have been tough to come by, since the company remains inside the cone of silence, but people familiar with SeaMicro’s hardware say it will pack about 80 Atom chips in a very small chassis. The company also has some proprietary hardware and software twists, these people said.

SeaMicro is in silence mode, but here is nugget from their web site.

At SeaMicro we believe data centers can be vastly more power efficient than they are today. To this end, we have tremendous customer support and outstanding Venture Capital backing. Our staff is comprised of experts with decades of experience and we are always looking for exceptional people who can add to our strength.

SeaMicro is a rapidly growing technology pioneer so you will wear many hats and have opportunity to grow. We believe that working for SeaMicro will be the most exciting and challenging chapter of your career.

The ARM based company is Smooth-Stone.

In Austin, Texas, there lurks another start-up called Smooth-Stone. According to people familiar with its plans, Smooth-Stone is working on a chip using the ARM architecture that will go into servers. ARM chips from companies like Samsung and Qualcomm typically make their way into phones like the iPhone.

Barry Evans, the chief executive of Smooth-Stone, did not immediately return a message seeking comment. Mr. Evans worked at Intel for many years in the company’s communications and mobile products groups.

Here is information in local papers. Austin Business Journal.

Smooth-Stone Inc., which is a member of the Austin Technology Incubator and develops low power server technology, will receive an initial $250,000 pre-seed investment from the state with potential for $1 million in total investment for the commercialization of its technology.

“Smooth-Stone’s innovative architecture has the potential to change the server market and keep Texas on the cutting edge of technology,” said Jack McDonald, chairman and CEO of Perficient Inc. and chairman of the Central Texas Regional Center of Innovation and Commercialization.

Barry Evans, CEO of Smooth-Stone, said the server market is catching on to what the mobile phone market has known for nearly 20 years.

“Power consumption matters,” Evans said. “Moore’s law delivers amazing gains in server compute performance, but power and cooling challenges are now front and center. Smooth-Stone is bringing low-power mobile phone technology to servers. We are proud to partner with the Austin Chamber of Commerce, the Central Texas Regional Center of Innovation and Commercialization, the state of Texas and the Austin Technology Incubator to lead the push for truly green datacenters.”

Data centers use large amounts of electricity, which some technology experts say is becoming a problem.

“There is a tremendous amount of improvement potential in reducing data center power consumption,” said Ian Ferguson, director of Segment Marketing with ARM, a company working with Smooth-Stone on low power technology.

Intel’s “A” letter Rival – ARM, not AMD

October 13, 2009 Dave Ohara

In data centers, the standard is go bigger with more power. But, in the mobile market energy efficient performance is the standard, and ARM is the winner. At some point, someone is going to build an IT infrastructure on Linux running on thousands of ARM processors.

People will laugh at the idea, but for the same reason IBM chose their Blue Gene supercomputer architecture, a start-up could do the same.

The Blue Gene/L supercomputer is unique in the following aspects:

Trading the speed of processors for lower power consumption.

Dual processors per node with two working modes: co-processor (1 user process/node: computation and communication work is shared by two processors) and virtual node (2 user processes/node)

System-on-a-chip design

A large number of nodes (scalable in increments of 1024 up to at least 65,536)

Three-dimensional torus interconnect with auxiliary networks for global communications, I/O, and management

Lightweight OS per node for minimum system overhead (computational noise)^[9]

News.com goes into more detail on Intel and ARM in the mobile space.

For Intel, small laptops bring challenge from ARM

by Brooke Crothers

Quick: Name an Intel rival whose name begins with an "A" and is abbreviated by three letters.

AMD? How about ARM. Even with attention focused on the immediate impact of Intel's earnings coming Tuesday afternoon, pesky questions linger about a likely future in which U.K.-based ARM and its satellite of chip and device makers pose a growing competitive threat. Maybe more so than Intel's traditional rival, Advanced Micro Devices.

Two recent statements from analysts argue that the camp of companies that make chips based on designs from ARM will dictate future competition in mobile computing. These companies include Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, Samsung, and, in the future, Apple.

New Tripoli, Penn.-based The Information Network said late last month that ARM processors, not Intel's Atom chip, will gain the largest chunk of the Netbook market in 2012--about a 55 percent market share. Netbooks are small, ultralight laptops typically priced under $400.

The market research firm argues that small ARM-based laptops, dubbed "smartbooks," will thrive under subsidized services from telephone carriers "modeled after Hewlett-Packard (cheap printer, expensive ink) and the mobile service providers (cheap cellphone, expensive monthly wireless charge)."

Note this comment on performance per watt.

And on Monday EE Times cited analyst Didier Scemama, with ABN AMRO Bank NV, who said there is a "shift towards computing based on ARM-Linux and away from Intel-Microsoft over the next technology cycle," which he said would begin in the second half of 2010, because ARM processors would match Intel chips in performance and beat them on power consumption and possibly cost.

The fastest growing internet companies have a sizeable Linux investment, and it would seem some are asking the question of whether they can run on an ARM-Linux platform.

Media’s Creative Destruction – competition benefitting consumers

October 12, 2009 Dave Ohara

WSJ has an opinion article on media’s challenge to adapting to the forces putting more power in the hands of consumers.

Media Moguls and Creative Destruction

Competition works to the benefit of consumers, not producers.

By L. GORDON CROVITZ

For media, this is the best of times and the worst. The best because the cost to publish news, make a video or distribute a song has never been lower. But also the worst because it's hard to find a company, new or old media, that has emerged with a sustainable business model. Consumers are left wondering how much longer their favorite sources of news and entertainment will be around.

The most recent stark contrast was between the $1 billion valuation for pre-revenue startup Twitter and the shutdown of the iconic Gourmet magazine. A new book provocatively entitled "The Curse of the Mogul: What's Wrong with the World's Leading Media Companies" explains how digital technology has undermined almost all media and why this creative destruction is set to continue.

The book, by investment banker Jonathan Knee and business strategists Bruce Greenwald and Ava Seave, details the dismal performance of almost all large media companies going back to the 1990s. It documents how and why the Internet wasn't the hoped-for savior of newspapers, magazines or broadcasters, and why almost all digital media executives have also found it hard to build companies that last.

The benefactors of this competition has been the data center market.

We should keep in mind that people are consuming more media than ever, all day and in real time through many new outlets. Content creators from musicians to authors can sidestep the middlemen who were once required to package and deliver the content. This means that as consumers, we have unprecedented choice in many areas.

Media companies also have options. They can become more efficient, find new revenue streams from their most engaged consumers, and add new services.

Still, no one knows which brands will survive in a world where the traditional advantages are the new disadvantages and where so many new-media companies don't survive the pace of change they helped accelerate. The challenge for all media—old and new—is the same, even if the difficulty level is higher than ever before: Focus on what makes each brand different and more valuable than the ever-increasing number of alternatives that technology makes inevitable.

How many media companies own big rooms with printing presses that dwarf their data centers?

The media have gone through periods of disruption before—from the development of the telegraph, telephone, radio and then television, but never at this pace. "Sometimes differences in degree become differences in kind," Mr. Knee says. "Never has there been this much fundamental change across so many sectors in such a short period of time." Moreover, the former competitive advantages of printing presses and unique access to large audiences have become costly liabilities.